Hi fellow Foodies,

Today I wanted to appreciate the ability to clean a kitchen item well after we should have lol

Cleaning Grease Stained Pans

In our house, we don't use a lot of "non-stick" pans for a litany of reasons but some of the main ones being how incredibly toxic and dangerous they are for our health! I know not everyone can pay attention to that which is fine but we are trying to make it a point to do these small improvements to our kitchen and lifestyle now so that we can reduce our exposure to toxins and other nasty aspects of life in the future!

With cooking and baking things in the oven, one of the things you are bound to use and likely quite often when you are using regular bake/cook wares, is you need to generously grease the pans with something! For us it's frequently coconut oil spray since it's coconut based and that's got a really high smoking point and makes for a great greaser that's not filled with other kinds of junk. What also happens is that we sometimes get a little lazy and don't immediately clean a pan after we use it, oops! I know my fellow foodies can relate to that! Lol

The pan we have is amazing, it's a solid aluminum pan and it's worked really well and cooks incredibly. What sadly happens though is that over the past few months with the holidays and stuff, a lot of dishes have piled up and I haven't felt like really cleaning them the way I should so it ended up getting worse than it should have lol. My wife made a comment about it so I knew that I had to clean it up or she would throw it away in frustration. I'm not one to piss away hard earned money like that so I knew I needed to get it cleaned!

With a search on the internet, one is going to find all kinds of nasty things like chemicals and other ways to clean these pans but for us, I know that I'd much rather use a little bit of gumption and elbow grease than some crazy chemicals to clean my stuff! I also didn't want to use a steel pad that would ruin the pan's finish and probably end up leaking junk into our food in the end so I went to my old faithful: cheap white vinegar! Not pictured here because I forgot to get it but it's just regular old baking soda lol. Vinegar and baking soda make a great combination for cleaning all kinds of stuff!

What I did for this, as I wasn't sure how long it would take, is pour a bunch of the vinegar in the pan so that it came up to the sides and covered the whole bottom. Afterwards, I then added a bunch of baking soda. The bubbles ensued that's for sure! The little man loved it, and now is demanding that we make a volcano lol. Can't blame him, the interaction is pretty cool!

I let the baking soda and vinegar combo sit for an hour or two while I was working so that was pretty convenient.

I could see that some of the junk was peeling up so I was glad that I let the stuff sit for a while so that it would remove the excess at the top and leave the stuff that I really needed to focus on, down below for me to start working on.

This is where I initially had a bit of difficulty! I was scraping and scraping but the stuff wasn't coming off too well and I was annoyed that I would have to do this for hours to get any real progress. Thankfully though, I did think of a trick but wasn't sure if it was going to work.

I ended up adding a bunch more baking soda, no additional vinegar, to the pan and then started scraping. It came off like a breeze! The baking soda acts as an abrasive and with the grease soaking the vinegar up on the pan, it combined and broke it down and the stuff came off almost like a warm knife through butter it was fantastic! The stuff came off in big chunks and damn was I glad that it wasn't going to take me all day to clean a single pan lol for a minute I was contemplating if I was going to give into my wife and ask her to buy a new pan since I didn't want to clean it.

I'm glad that I persevered though! It came out absolutely perfect and the pan now looked just like the day we bought it! There were a little bit of grease stains on the sides of the pan but I didn't really care about that since it was going to be difficult to get to those without filling the entire pan with vinegar and almost wasting a gallon for very little return. My wife is a perfectionist though so she might ask me to do it one day lol I will definitely have this trick tucked into my back pocket when she does ask!

Hopefully this little tip helps someone else in the Foodie community find a way for them to clean a pan they've been wanting to take care of!

^-CmplXty. _{Real human written content, never AI.}

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